Flare (5 page)

“I’m going to try and find a shop that hasn’t burned down or had everything stolen”, Jerry said as he negotiated the silent streets, “I want to save my supplies for when we really need them”.

“Are you sure?”  I asked, nodding towards the red glow in the sky, “it looks like half the town’s on fire”.

“Then I’ll find a shop in the half that isn’t burning”, he said, turning away from the glow and promptly losing us in a maze of residential streets.

As we reached one junction, I jumped out of my skin as another car pulled out, lights on main beam and horn honking as it passed us, swerving from one side of the road to the other.

I got a glimpse of the occupants as it tore past, five teenagers crammed into a vintage Mini, the driver swigging from a bottle of vodka that he raised at us in salute, almost crashing into us in the process.
 

“Jerry, I think maybe we should leave”, I said, watching in the mirror as the mini careened off the road, through a garden fence and then back onto the road again to continue its chaotic journey.

As we sat there watching, a large group of youths began to approach from a nearby street, most of them holding bottles of alcohol and not a few with bats, crowbars or large pieces of wood in their hands.

They were laughing and pointing at us, and despite not being able to hear what they were saying it didn’t take a genius to guess what was on their minds.

“Yeah, I think so too
.  Forget the shop, let’s just go”.

He put the car into gear and pulled away.  I twisted to watch the group, some of them running now as we gathered speed.  When it was clear they wouldn’t catch us, a hail
of bottles arced up into the air, raining down all around us, shattering on the road and spraying the sides of the car with broken glass and alcohol.

A few thumped onto the roof and one lucky shot bounced off the driver’s window mere inches from Jerry’s head, making him yell in shock and almost swerve off the road.

“What did we do to them?” He shouted, keeping his head low as if we were being shot at, peering over the wheel from somewhere down between his elbows, “Why are they doing this?”

“Because”, I said as I watched them fade into the distance, knowing the answer but not finding any comfort in it, “we’ve got something they haven’
t, they want it, and there’s no one left to stop them taking it.  So if I were you, I’d keeping driving until we find somewhere dark, safe and a
very
long way from anyone else”.

Chapter 8

Ten minutes later we were thoroughly lost.  Jerry had taken us back out of the town proper, and now we found ourselves navigating yet more narrow country roads.  The only thing keeping me from sleep was the excruciating pain in my ankle, tiredness dulling my senses while the pain
enhanced them so I found myself exhausted but buzzing with nervous energy at the same time.

“I need to stop soon”, Jerry said, his voice betraying his own tiredness, “everything is starting to blur”.

I pointed at a dirt track a dozen metres ahead, starlight illuminating the barn that it led to.

“Will that do?” 

He squinted and then nodded, pulling off the road and onto the rutted track, every bounce and jolt sending waves of pain up my leg.

By the time we reached the barn I was gripping the dashboard with both hands, teeth clenched to keep from screaming.  Jerry parked the car on the far side of the large wooden structure from the road, then came round to my side and helped me out, half-carrying me to the smaller of the two doors.

He shone his torch at the lock and grunted.  It was secured with a hasp and padlock, and there was little chance we’d get it open without damaging the lock beyond repair.

Jerry left me leaning against the wall while he checked the other entrance, a pair of huge double doors that were easily big enough for a large tractor to drive through when open.

He was back in moments.  “There’s no way we’re getting through that one”, he said, then headed off towards the car, returning in less than a minute with a small crowbar.

“Where the hell did you get that?”  I asked as he put the curved end in the loop of the padlock and began to put his weight on it.

“I packed everything I could think of that I might need”, he replied as he pushed down harder.  The lock came free with a crack, shockingly loud in the night air as a piece of metal shot off into the dark.

He pulled the door open and stuck his head inside, playing his torch around before helping me through the door.

“Looks like it’s used to store machinery, mostly”, he said as he led me towards several bales of hay sitting in a corner well away from the door.  We passed an old tractor, half stripped down with pieces of engine lying neatly on a dirty white sheet, then a huge plough with rusted teeth and a long towing bar that almost took out my good ankle in the dark.

I reached the hay and sank into it with relief, while Jerry disappeared back out to the car to get some camping gear, taking the torch with him and leaving me in the dark.

The barn smelled of machine oil, hay and damp, and once the light was gone my ears immediately homed in on a rustling sound that I could only assume was rats, going about their night-time business with little care that we had interrupted them.

The bobbing light of the torch came back through the door, held in Jerry’s teeth as he brought in armloads of bedding and a small lamp that he gave to me with an instruction to wind it.

I stared at it for a moment, then saw the small winding-handle on one side and realised that it must be dynamo powered.

I cranked it for a couple of minutes, then flicked a switch on the side and a soft light bathed the area, dim but good enough to see by once we were used to it.

Jerry laid two thin foam mats on top of hay bales, then two sleeping bags, his new and shiny and mine old and tattered but comfortable-looking.

“We should have a look at your ankle”, he said once he was done, “if it’s broken we need to find you some help”.

I nodded, knowing he was right, and leaned down to undo my laces.  Every little movement was agony, jagged shards of pain racing through my foot, ankle and lower leg, and I could feel the swelling scraping against the trainer as I gently eased it off.

When I got to the sock
Jerry had to help, and as he peeled it back he drew in his breath sharply.

I looked down and in the beam of the torch I saw that my ankle was at least twice its normal size and heavily bruised, the puffy flesh an ugly purple colour.

“That’s a little beyond my first aid skills”, he said with a grimace.  “Do you think it’s broken?”

I shrugged helplessly.  “I don’t know.  It hurts like hell, but it might be a sprain or even a dislocation.  I reckon the best bet is to strap it up and see what happens”. 

I pointed to the first aid kit he’d brought in with the bedding.

“Have you got any icepacks in there?”

He rummaged through and came up with a break and shake icepack and a length of crepe bandage, doing his best to strap my ankle before activating the icepack and placing it on the swelling.

That done, I lay back and covered myself with the sleeping bag, leaving my ankle out and the bag unzipped so that I could keep it iced.  I promised myself I would stay awake as Jerry went out to the car again, but I must have dozed because when I next looked over, he was back and pulling a pair of boil in the bag ration packs out of a mess tin that sat on a tiny burner, the flame giving off almost no heat or light from this distance, and precious little smoke either.

“Do you want pasta in spicy tomato sauce or beef and dumplings?”  He asked as he placed the bags on tin plates.

“Pasta, I’ve tried the army’s excuse for beef before”.

He passed me one of the plates and a fork while he tucked into the contents of the other bag, not even bothering to empty it onto the plate.

I followed suit, pulling myself carefully into a sitting position with my back resting against another hay bale while I ate.

“Is it going to be like this everywhere?”  I asked when I was finished, putting the plate to one side and lying back.

Jerry looked up from scraping the last of the so-called beef from the inside of the bag and nodded.

“Yes, I would think so.  Probably much worse on the day-side.  If my instruments were working I’d be able to tell you just how bad it was, but as they have extremely sensitive components, I rather suspect that they’re junk now”.

I nodded slowly as I took in what he was saying, pushing away the tiredness as I put together the pieces of what he’d been saying since I’d met him on the hilltop.

One of the reasons I’d become a journalist was my need to know
why
, coupled with my inability to leave anything alone until I was satisfied that I knew everything about it.  I’d been like it since I was little, forever taking things apart, both literally and figuratively, until my parents came close to tearing their hair out.  I alternated between spending long hours in the public library, often being the last one to leave, to coming home with unspeakable things in jars for ‘projects’ that my mum would throw out the moment she found them.

“How many people, apart from you, are capable of having
come up with the same algorithms you did?”  I asked.

Jerry shrugged and lit a cigarette, then offered me the packet.  I took one and lit it, then leaned back again, careful not to let hot ash drop on the tinder-dry hay.

“Hundreds of people
could
have come up with them, but I suspect you’re asking how many people in my field of study may have known that this was going to be a bad flare, am I right?”

I nodded, impressed that he’d seen where I was going from the first question.

“Ok, so how many might have known?”

“Apart from me, maybe four or five people in the UK, across the world perhaps a few dozen”.

“And did you talk to any of the ones in the UK when you started to get your suspicions?”

He shook his head wearily.  “No.  I tried, but none of them were available.  It’s almost as if they were told not to talk to me”.

I almost passed the last comment off as being Jerry’s innate paranoia, but then something occurred to me.

“Jerry, how many of those people work for the government?”

“None of them, directly, but they all consult for them just like I used to before I lost my job”.  He glanced down at the ground as he said it, the wound still as fresh as it always would be.  It must be hard to go from being a well-respected astrophysicist to a crackpot conspiracy theorist overnight, but that was exactly what had happened to Jerry.

“So they all consult for the government.  Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the only other people who might have seen it coming disappeared shortly before it hit?”

He nodded.  “That’s what I was trying to tell you earlier.  They would have been watching, all the space-capable governments would have been, although only us, the Americans and the Russians would have any chance of being able to predict the severity of a flare”.

The ramifications of what he was saying were staggering.  If the government had known that a flare this bad was going to strike but not warned anyone, it was nothing short of criminal.  How many lives could have been saved if flights had been grounded and the national grid switched off, if such a thing were possible?

“How much warning would they have had?”  I was angry now, the burning houses in Brighton and the wreckage of the plane across the motorway playing in my mind’s eye like a horror movie.

“Uh, fourteen, sixteen hours maybe.  They’d know there was going to be a flare long before that, but you can only really be certain of the strength once it leaves the sun”.

I finished my cigarette and stubbed it carefully on the concrete floor.

“I thought you predicted it earlier than that?”

He nodded.  “I did, but I was still wrong, it was far worse than I thought.  Maybe they realised how bad it was going to be and decided to wait it out in a bunker somewhere, then come back out and pick up the pieces once it’s over?”

“Do you think there’ll be much left by the time they do?”

He shrugged again.  “Maybe, who knows?  If they’ve had any time at all to plan for this, then they might have a work force that can get the infrastructure back up and running quicker than I thought.  It might not be so bad after all”.

“Well that’s a matter of opinion”.

The voice came out of the darkness by the door, making us both jump.  Jerry spun, scattering the plate and now cold stove across the floor with a loud ringing sound, while I all but pitched backwards off the hay bale.

“Who’s there?”  Jerry called nervously, “show yourself”.

A figure emerged from the darkness, little more than a silhouette at the edge of the lamp light.  It was hard to make out details at first, but the figure gradually resolved into the form of a man dressed in outdoor gear complete with a loadbearing vest, a cap, and a very large, very dangerous looking shotgun, both barrels of which were pointed directly at my chest.